Kurt Vonnegut

It is a sad day.

I'm stopping myself from writing a huge post to the Vonnegut thread on ILE.
I am with ya, misshajim.
I just wrote emails to two friends from high school, whom i don't keep in touch with, only because we shared Vonnegut so deeply for those particular years.
I'm trying to reach out to anyone who loved him...good God, he shaped my brain!
The weather here sucks, so I feel like the sky is mourning. My absolute grief is tangible in hail, sleet and snow.
You are not alone.
keep reading tributes to him - the outpouring is going to be enormous, and...read his books again, when you are ready.

I have always had a soft spot for Vonnegut. I liked the way he thought. If he held something in contempt, he show you that thing in the light of his contempt and bring you over to his point of view. If he admired it, he could share his admiration equally well. And his reasons for the way he felt were so superbly simple and straightforward that he compelled your assent.

As a novelist or story teller he did not create subtle, complex memorable characters. In another thread, I described his books as talking animal fables where the animals happened to be human. His stories had the elemental quality of fables, like stuff out of the Grimm brothers. Everyone agrees they were deeply satirical, but I think that Vonnegut never sat down to write a satire in his life. He described what he saw, as he saw it, and what he saw invariably satirized itself under his eye.

Literary he was not. It would have killed his books to be literary. Every time Twain got literary pretensions, he wrote his weakest stuff. I can't recall Vonnegut ever displaying that particular weakness.

We need an author like Vonnegut always to be with us. I don't know who will fill his place now. Someone will, I hope. But I am thankful we had our Vonnegut for all those decades. He'll be missed. He will long be loved.

after putting to bed my 2 little ones, I can finally sit down and have this beer in his honour (and regret I stopped smoking 5 years ago...)
<i>Bluebeard</i> is, as I wrote somewhere else as well, one of my 5 favourite novels. In a sense it was lifesaving in a time, and I've had to get back to it and see why it still is tonight. In the old battered paperback edition of mine, a good 50% is passionately underlined, but please let me choose 2 quotes as a personal reminder here for tonight. they are so light and airy and simple, the way truth usually is...

"Slatzinger, who still believes her to be only semiliterate, patronized her most daintily with these words: As the philosopher George Santayana said, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,'.

Is that a fact? - she said. - Well, I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we are doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.

Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harward - said Slatzinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs Berman said: Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed".

and again, still from Bluebeard:

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slatzinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relative-maybe fifty or a hundred people at most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.
That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community trasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibtionist".
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! were you ever drunk last night!"

I know I had said 2, but a third can't stay back:

"'Just think about it -she said- You know about all sorts of terrible things that are going to happen to these people, yourself included. Wouldn't you like to hop into a time machine and go back and warn them, if you could?'
She described an eerie scene in the Los Angeles railroad station back in 1933. 'An Armenian boy with a cardboard suitcase and a portfolio is saying goodbye to his immigrant father. He is about to seek his fortune in a great city twenty-five hundred miles away. An old man wearing an eye patch, who has just arrived in a time machine from 1987, sidles up. What does the old man say to him?'
'I'd have to think about it, I said. I shook my head. 'Nothing. Cancel the time machine.'
'Nothing?' - she said.
I told her this: 'I want him to believe for as long as possible that he is going to become a great painter and a good father.'

ps. sorry for the weird formatting...

Thanks misshajim! Nice to see his words!

And thanks, Aimless. You put his legacy in words, and i appreciate that.

"We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now.' It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke."

(from "Man Without a Country," by way of Michael Dirda's chat earlier today)

(Isaac = Isaac Asimov, We = American Humanists Assocation)

Aaaargh! I didn't know he had died! Aaaaargh!

A big drink to his memory!

I spotted this:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/16/kurt-vonneguts-lifefox-news-style/

It made me think I don't understand the US anymore. On a thread on ILM about us rock critics like Kogan and Christagau I refered to them as "culturally closed" which drew objections that these critics liked world music. But what I meant was that like this Fox News piece, I just feel like its something I can't even appreciate their viewpoint.

so it goes.